Digg is Deadd

It was a good run, Digg.com. You certainly had a great idea and funneled plenty of Web traffic to opportunistic and manipulative publishers.

Alas, the run is over. And it's not coming back.

According to the latest Compete.com data (April, 2010) Digg lost an astounding 13.8 million unique visits from March to April, 2010 -- a near 36 percent drop. Apparently sensing impending doom, Digg founder Kevin Rose has made several announcements of retooling Digg, but nothing has materialized. In fact, the announcements might have been the worst thing Digg founder Kevin Rose could have done. It's been over a year since Rose announced that changes would come. In the mean time, Facebook and Twitter have soared and it appears the Digg crowd grew tired of waiting. While the changes seem to be close to a reality now, it's too late.

A recently released video demonstrates what will change with the new Digg. And, by all accounts, it's another social network. An unnecessary one. The main focus is to make friends (starting by importing your social graph from sites like Facebook) and Digg stories. Then, your new Digg page will show the stories Dugg most by all your friends. Sound like something your friends "liked" on Facebook? Or perhaps something retweeted on Twitter?

The biggest problem with Digg in the past was that unless you devoted serious time to it and knew how to work the system, you had little hope of ever making the front page. The only stories that made the front page were typically those voted up by voting blocs; networks of like-minded individuals attempting to send streams of traffic to each others' sites no matter the content of the story. And if you didn't make the front page, the benefits were very little, if any. Now, you still will need to dedicate serious time to the site -- only this time you won't receive near the level of exposure. That is, unless your "friends" vote up your stories at a breakneck pace. Which, for all intents and purposes, puts us right back where we started with Digg. In other words, there's no innovation here and the real value proposition of Digg hasn't changed, it's just become more labor intensive.

In the soon-to-be end, Digg will become known as the first network to die from social fatigue. Facebook and Twitter are booming, LinkedIn is holding steady and even MySpace seems to have settled into a niche. But Digg is in a deadly, unrecoverable tail spin. The fact is, people -- real people -- are beginning to tire. Submit this, upload that, vote on this, "like" that, be my "friend", check in here, suggest this, retweet that ... there's already so much to do. The only thing left to "Digg" is a grave.

I thought Digg had died long time ago. It's just a shell of what it used to be anyway. There are way more places to go to get traffic, that doesn't require you to kneel down to the powers that be. Digg had its heyday, now its over. Bon voyage!

As someone who used to teach others how to use social bookmarking sites and primarily Digg, this is a surprise even to me.

We could see the decline in Digg but now a documented exodus is amazing.

This is not just the death of Digg, it is the death of social bookmarking altogether. Mixx came and went in two years. StumbleUpon is dying too, not only is the algo so flaky there and the users now unresponsive this is the death of an entire social medium with used to love.

The challenge of getting front page on Digg is what made it fun, getting past the Digg mafia trolls, gaming the algo etc.

Between the Digg mafia and the removal of the shout mechanism in Digg, I agree, there is nothing left to Digg but the grave. LOL

I never discovered any benefits of using Digg for me. The amount of time and effort required to hit the front page was disproportionate to the prize. I never managed to get it to work positively for me. I can't say I'll miss it.

It was indeed disappointing news to hear. Digg.com had been in their prime before the release of these social media sites. The moment, from which people realized that these social media sites can be used for the same purpose, Digg.com started tasting their loss.